Rape Culture, Fundamentalism, and the New Atheism

A Google image search for “Christian patriarchy” brought this up. You can, uh, draw your own conclusion.

There’s been no shortage of sex abuse scandals in the Christian Church in recent years. By now the Catholic Church scandals are old news, but Protestants have rushed to get in on the action in the last year or three as well, with allegations against dozens of institutions coming to light. Bill Gothard of the respected (by some) Institute for Biblical Life Principles recently resigned amid allegations of sexual harassment, and numerous damning exposés have been written on the entrenched rape culture — where victims are blamed and perpetrators walk free — at universities like Bob Jones and Patrick Henry.

Season’s Shootings, or: I am an Ass

On Friday, when the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting occurred, I got the news via Facebook. (For those of us who have been ruined by the digital age, Facebook and Twitter are our main source of headlines.) I saw the usual postings that you see every time a story like this breaks. “OMG I can’t believe this happened,” “My prayers are with the families” — that sort of thing — many of them accompanied by links to news articles.

I didn’t click a single link.

Rashomon, and Why Jesus is a Postmodernist

For a film buff, I really don’t own that many DVDs — somewhere in the neighborhood of 30-40, and most of them were either gifts or finds at a Blockbuster 5-for-$20 sale. One of the films I’ve made sure to add to my collection, though, is Rashomon, a low-budget samurai flick from the legendary Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. I wrote several papers over it during my undergrad years, and now I’m working on another one for a graduate course I’m taking. I’m far from the first to write about it, though, since it was such a revolutionary film. Every western, crime movie, and art house drama — every movie — from the last 60-odd years has stolen something from it.

Rashomon isn’t a narrative film. It tells the same crime story — a rape and a murder — four different times, each time from a different character’s perspective. It’s not a mystery, though. It’s not a film that invites you to piece together what happened and figure out whodunnit. All four stories are entirely different, and mutually exclusive. And all four characters take credit for the murder.

Rashomon is a deeply postmodern film because at its core it denies the existence of “truth.” Each character involved in the incident constructs his or her own truth, recalling the same events, but casting them in a light that is both self-aggrandizing and self-incriminating. And Kurosawa has no interest in telling you “what really happened,” because there is no “what really happened.” Without an observer, there’s no event to be observed, and there has never in history been such a thing as a neutral observer.

If You Can’t Be Female, at Least Be a Celebrity

I’m currently about halfway through Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics by Ross Douthat of the New York Times. Douthat is NYT’s token conservative Catholic columnist, and I have to admit that, whether I want to agree with him or not (short version of my viewpoint: as a grad student, I’m far too steeped in postmodernism to form actual opinions anymore), he tells a compelling story regarding how American churches abandoned orthodoxy, allowing for the rise of heresies like the the Jesus Seminar, Dan Brown’s revisionist history, and Benny Hinn’s outfits.

Of particular interest, though admittedly less amusing than poking fun at Dan Brown (short version: that guy sucks), is his take on what happened to the two major branches of mainstream Protestantism in the ’60s and ’70s. To summarize Douthat’s analysis, both Mainline and Evangelical stripes got hooked on political activism for its own sake, and in the process were turned into their respective parties’ lapdogs instead of being the protectors of the Gospel that they should have been. The Mainline decided that every political cause was basically the Civil Rights Movement and started doing whatever the New Left told them; Evangelicals decided that every political cause was the Pro-Life Movement, and proceeded to be yanked around by Reaganomics and Neoconservativism for the next four decades.